Couple sentenced in pot-robbery attempt that left accomplice dead

The husband and wife who tried to rob a medical-marijuana dispensary in Surprise in 2012 were sentenced Friday to lengthy prison terms for their role in a caper that left their accomplice dead.

Maricopa Superior Court Commissioner Jeffrey Rueter sentenced Jesse Gillen to 14 years and his wife, Stephanie Conley, to 10 years, responding to a plea deal in which the pair admitted to second-degree murder. Gillen also received prison terms for drug, driving-under-the-influence and parole-violation charges related to the crime, but Rueter ordered the time be served concurrently. Both 30, the two were credited for the nearly two years they have been in custody.

At the time, their arrest was seen as a cautionary tale about the perils of allowing legal medical-marijuana transactions. Police throughout the Valley warned that pot inventories would present a dangerous temptation to crooks and drug addicts. They warned a rash of similar hold-ups was inevitable.

But the rush didn't materialize. The law changed, and patients could only get marijuana from licensed dispensaries. At the time of the attempted robbery, patients with authorization cards could grow pot for their own medical use and offer it to others like them.

Such an arrangement is what lured Gillen and Conley Martin Ridgeway's home at about 2 a.m. in August 2012.

Ridgeway said he felt sorry for the pair and wanted to help them. But he also was a bit wary — he said he wrote in his appointment book "cops or robbers?" When the meeting time at his house near Greenway Road and Grand Avenue kept slipping, he decided they wouldn't show up and went to bed.

Later, Conley knocked on the door. Ridgeway did what, in the words of prosecutor Hillary Weinberg, "few others would." He opened his door to strangers late at night to sell them pot.

Prosecutors, citing surveillance-camera footage, said Conley and an accomplice, Shawn Ryan, entered. The medical cards looked fake. Ridgeway said he couldn't help without breaking the law and refused to sell to them.

Ryan pulled out a gun and Conley got on her cellphone, then she opened the door and left. Two more men entered, wearing masks. One was Gillen, carrying a flare gun, and the other was Andree Smith. Conley went outside and was seen on camera wiping fingerprints off the front gate.

Inside, a scuffle ensued when Ridgeway brandished a knife. In a blur, someone shot him and someone else stabbed him a dozen times. Ridgeway was airlifted to a hospital. Inside the house, Ryan was dead from stab wounds.

That fact led prosecutors to charge Conley and Gillen with murder. Under Arizona's "felony murder rule," someone who commits a felony that results in a death can be charged with murder, even if they didn't kill anyone.

Applying that law gave Rueter a tricky decision because Smith, who initially fled to California, later pleaded guilty to manslaughter. He had been involved in the physical violence, but he was sentenced to 10½ years in prison.

Conley and Gillen were not involved in the violence, but they faced life behind bars.

Their attorneys argued in court that the application of the felony murder rule was unfair. They said that the couple had struggled with long-term drug problems but had never been violent and that it made no sense that Smith would be freed before them.

Rueter said that argument was the most persuasive mitigating factor, and he tilted toward leniency.

But he also accepted Weinberg's reasoning that this was not the case of a group of bumblers whose plot spiraled out of control. Instead, she argued, texts and video footage showed they had come up with "a fairly well-thought-out plan," cased Ridgeway's house and used deception in the form of fraudulent medical-marijuana cards to get inside it.

Ridgeway testified Friday that the trauma of the attack forced him to move. His emotional distress steered Rueter toward a tougher sentence.

Gillen, then Conley, turned to him and apologized. Gillen read a prepared statement and broke down at the end. Conley's eyes were scarlet from sobbing throughout the 90-minute proceeding.

"I am very sorry Mr. Ridgeway," Conley told him. "It hurts me to see people hurting. I have so much remorse. There is no excuse for my behavior."

On Friday, Ridgeway said what happened to him had nothing to do with pot. To him, there was nothing inherently dangerous about offering medical marijuana. Pharmacies get robbed every day for prescription drugs and people can get robbed selling furniture on Craigslist, he reasoned.